Opinion: Debate rages while predators lie in wait

DESPITE Queensland’s latest and tragically fatal shark attack making headlines, it will take something else for the world to sit up and really take notice, writes Michael Madigan.

From sharks to salties, Queensland’s tropical north can be a dangerous place.

IT WILL happen. Possibly not for years but, eventually, it will happen. A six-year-old girl, Annabelle, the only child of prominent Sydney surgeon Sebastian and his lawyer wife Caroline, will be walking with her parents on a beach north of Cairns on a magnificent morning. A hung-over German backpacker will be idly filming the scene on his mobile phone.

MP wants open season

Local traders’ solution

Victim mourned

And that sweet-natured, giggling little girl will run down to the ocean’s edge while her parents smile indulgently, warning her to stay out of the water (dutiful parents you understand – mindful of the risks).

But Annabelle will venture in a few metres as Sebastian and Caroline laugh and shake their heads at her obstinacy – “it’s absolutely her defining characteristic”, Caroline tells friends.

Both parents will move towards her with just the slightest hint of urgency, intent on guiding Annabelle back to the safety of the sand, their actions dutifully recorded on the mobile. But a crocodile, lurking in water made slightly turbid by recent unseasonal rainfall, will beat them to it. That croc will leap up out of the water, seize Annabelle, and drag her out to sea.

And this nation will go insane.

The footage will go viral, social media will be in a frenzy, southern- based “quality’’ press will make Annabelle’s death front-page news two days running, and the op-eds will be awash with a new found urgency, thundering that “Something Must Be Done’’ about this sudden proliferation of wild, predatory crocodiles stalking innocent middle-class children in north Queensland.

The shark attack death of Melbourne doctor Daniel Christidis in the Whitsundays can’t be categorised by mere words. “Tragedy’’ hardly cuts it. All that potential, all that talent, all that capacity to bring value to all our lives ended in a few seconds and the loss, rightly so, has dominated Melbourne media reports for days.

Had Christidis been an Aboriginal kid taken by a shark off Lockhart River, the country would have paid less attention. Unfortunate, but true.

Had he been a 70-year-old Italian sugarcane farmer eaten by a croc while checking irrigation pumps in the Pioneer River west of Mackay, the world beyond Queensland may not even have heard of the loss.

But when the mythical Annabel’s hideous death is recorded and disseminated globally, the entire framework of reference surrounding the debate about Queensland’s historic and uneasy relationship with apex predators will alter dramatically.

All those noble sentiments about sharing habitat and respecting the predator’s natural environment and “educating’’ people about the need to grasp the concept of coexistence will be swept aside.

Those with their hands on the levers of public policy are largely city-based and middle class. So are those with the loudest voices in all forms of media, as well as those among us who are the most devout environmentalists. Overwhelmingly, there’s an orthodoxy in their thoughts on shark and croc culls, but all of them will undergo a subtle, possibly even subconscious conversion after watching little Annabelle dragged off to her death.

Their internal image of the natural world will alter from some vague Augustinian myth about lions resting peacefully beside lambs and crystallise into a gruesome reality – a reality where people get ripped apart and eaten alive, and not just any people but …. “people just like us!’’

And policy will change and crocodiles, once again, will be killed. We’ll call it “culling’’ but it will be killing. Rangers won’t just follow a policy of removal but (hopefully) a far more restrained and civilised version of what occurred in the three decades following World War II, when restless servicemen returned from combat familiar with those large critters, bore .303 rifles. With one eye on fast money from crocodile skins and the other on the thrill of the hunt, those men pretty much shot every crocodile south of the Cairns Esplanade.

The state LNP Member for Whitsunday Jason Costigan will be joined by the Opposition Tourism spokesman David Crisafulli today in the Whitsundays to ramp up demands for shark drumlines.

The Innisfail-born Crisafulli has for years attempted to get beyond the political and philosophical tribalism that often dominates the debate surrounding the control of predators.

“This problem has to be addressed and it will be addressed, inevitably, because images of these attacks will begin to emerge, and the debate will be transformed by those images,’’ he said.

The Mackay-born Costigan puts it more bluntly: “It seems to me, tragically, that there will have to be more human sacrifices before we are allowed to act.’’